1 Million Ads. 4 Years. 27 Ad Verticals. 

Our first-of-its-kind, large-scale, benchmark report, Diversity in Ad Creative, leveraged artificial intelligence and machine learning, supported by human quality check, to assess each ad for its composition by ethnicity, race, gender, and age.

“Diversity is such an important topic, yet there has been little quantifiable information available at scale related to the people featured in advertising creative,” said Melinda McLaughlin, CMO of Extreme Reach. “We set out to give brands and agencies the information needed to make the decisions that matter to their business. This report provides a high level view of diversity in ads that establishes the baseline for the industry, from which brands can devise their own unique roadmap.” 

The findings included below may surprise you. For example:

• White actors have accounted for 73% of the people seen in video ad creative in 2022, compared to 66% in 2021, 67% in 2020, and 74% in 2019.
• Black, Asian, and Hispanic representation in video ad creative declined in 2022, with Hispanic representation reaching its lowest mark in four years.
• Male cast members outnumbered females visually in 2022 and the male skew is even more pronounced when analyzing the voices heard in advertising. 

We invite you to download the full report to see additional insights.  

Diversity in Ad Creative

What’s next? While this first study focuses on video ads in N. America, we will release similar reports for the UK and other regions in the coming year. 

This is one of the many areas of insight made possible by our end-to-end creative-to-media supply chain. Reach out at any time to talk about what that would look like for you and your team.